Monaco: Wall of Ridicule

In 1511 an Italian writer named Niccoló Machiavelli journeyed to Monaco to gather material for a book by watching the agile Grimaldi rulers in action. Last week the incumbent Grimaldi, Prince Rainier III, could have used a couple of guileful hints from Machiavelli’s The Prince in his squabble with France’s Charles de Gaulle.

What set Rainier and De Gaulle at odds was Monaco’s long standing as a tax haven, a situation that dates from 1816, when the reigning prince sold off some acreage and put the proceeds in a fund to cover government expenses and relieve Monégasques forevermore of the need to pay taxes. France saw nothing wrong with this until thousands of French corporations and individuals began setting up domiciles in Monaco to dodge French taxes.

Early this year, possibly to relax from the Algerian crisis and other serious matters, Charles de Gaulle gave Monaco six months to reform its tax laws or lose its special status (though Monaco is theoretically sovereign, it exists as a privileged protectorate of France, free of customs duties). When the ultimatum expired fortnight ago, Paris sent customs agents to set up barriers at the border that Novelist Colette once described as the frontier of flowers. Mostly, the revenuers darted about in mobile vans and on motorcycles, making nuisances of themselves, which was the idea. “Berlin has its wall of shame,” complained one Monégasque businessman, “but we have our wall of ridicule.”

Last week De Gaulle pushed matters closer to the brink by doubling postage rates for Monegasques to 10¢ a letter. After hushed parleys in his palace, Rainier retaliated in kind. With the crisis threatening to escalate, Princess Grace rushed back from a shopping trip to Paris with her two children and a poodle, and 30 “war” correspondents flocked into the principality. In the U.S., meanwhile, Rainier found a champion in the New York Herald Tribune’s Art Buchwald, a quondam Riviera rover now based in Washington. Rainier should bar a Negro student from the Monaco High School, suggested Buchwald, so that the U.S. would have an excuse to send in federal marshals. “When it seems that they can’t handle the situation,” he added, “we would have to send in paratroopers to protect the marshals. Pretty soon we’d have Monaco ringed with troops, and General de Gaulle would have second thoughts about taking over the principality.”